The present invention relates to a method of writing information in a bit serial sequence on a record carrier body. Said record carrier body comprises a plurality of successive sectors, said information being arranged in a data block, said sector having the capacity for the storage of at least one data block, said data block comprising a first and a second number of data segments, said second number of data segments being substantially smaller than said first number of data segments, said method comprising the steps of:
1. loading into a memory in a first sequence of first data segments the information to be written into said first number of data segments;
2. adding an equal number of correction bits to the information stored in each of said first data segments of said first number of data segments;
3. a first phase of writing in a sector of said record carrier body, said first phase comprising the following substeps:
a. dividing each of said first data segments into an equal number of data subsegments; PA1 b. fetching from each first data segment a first data subsegment and writing in a bit serial sequence into said first number of data segments the content of each of said fetched first data subsegment into said record carrier body; PA1 c. repeating said fetching and writing of substep b for each further data subsegment of each first data segment until all data subsegments are written into said sector.
Often the information written on the record carrier body cannot be erased.
This is for example the case when an optical disc is used as record carrier body. In this case writing the information is done by burning a hole onto the disc. This can cause some problems when the information has become obsolete due to given circumstances, and so has to be updated. The updating of the information may concern, for example, the changing of the status a data unit from valid to invalid or from actual to obsolete, the changing of the content of a data unit, and the supplementing of the content of a data unit. Because writing is usually irreversible, local updating of the informaton at a later stage is not possible.
A known solution therefore is to leave non-inscribed an area of the sector to be written, in this case the second number of data segments.
In said area updating information can then be introduced during a further write operation. Such updating information may be, for example, the address of a further sector where the updated information is stored.
A drawback of this solution is that when an error and specially a burst error occurs in the updated information, this cannot be corrected, thus leaving the updated information unusable.